These village and bedouin shaykhs in central and southern jordans not only played important roles in local land matters but in regional divisions of land as well. Several important regional divisions of land occurcd in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The 4 Ad wan divided up their lands among their constituent sections ca. 1760T Around the same time the ‘Adwan,The New Jordans, the Abbad, and the settled families of al-Salt divided up the western part of al-Balqa' into what eventually became several dozen villages. The various sec-dons of the Bam Sakhr also divided up their vast holdings among themselves.

The early 19th century was thus a time in which local social control, through settled and bedouin family groupings headed by shaykhs, exerted control over land. Formal government control was non-existent,Cheap Jordans, and while individually-controlled land did exist,jordan releases, family control of this resource was paramount. The coming of the new Ottoman age was to affect this situation in several profound ways.

The reasons why the Ottoman empire decided to reimpose its direct control over the jordansian regions are familiar and a detailed study of them lies outside the scope of this study. In brief,Retro Jordans, the loss of the empire’s control over its outlying provinces combined with the political, military,Jordans Shoes, and economic intrusion of the West into the Middle East prompted the long series of Ottoman “reforms” that stretched from the late 18th century through the period of the Tan-zimat (1839-1876) and into the late 19th century. As part of these reforms, the central government moved to reassert its authority throughout the empire. It accomplished this by curbing the independence of local rulers throughout the empire (and especially outlying regions like jordans), rcimposing a new, more Western-style Ottoman bureaucratic and military presence, and extracting taxes to finance the creation of a Western-style military and bureaucracy. The relatively late move of the Ottomans into the jordansian region starting in 1851 also served to shore up the central government’s control over the important hajj route, which expanded beyond religious importance alone when the Ottomans erected telegraph lines in the area in the late 19th century and later connected Damascus and Medina by rail in the first decade of the 20th century.